TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=90TT0151> <title> Jan. 15, 1990: Profile:Lady Antonia Fraser </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Jan. 15, 1990 Antarctica </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> PROFILE, Page 66 Not Quite Your Usual Historian </hdr> <body> Champion of imprisoned writers, chronicler of monarchs, Lady Antonia Fraser stirs controversy without even trying By Bonnie Angelo She is the kind of woman Maureen O'Hara used to play in big-budget costume movies: Lady Antonia Fraser, beautiful, hot-blooded, titled daughter of a noble line, turreted castles in her background and the whiff of scandal in her past. But the portrait of a romance-novel heroine slips out of focus with a closer look, for that same Lady Antonia is an internationally established historian, the author of best-selling biographies and a social activist. She is mother of six, protective wife of renowned playwright Harold Pinter, and also dashes off detective stories, wafts along the British TV celeb circuit, and displays an admirable tennis serve. But forget Goody Two-Shoes. This paragon wades into controversy with brio. She has publicly criticized Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies and rallied British writers to think more politically. She marches for Soviet Jewry. She organizes petitions and badgers officials to help free dissident writers in jails across Europe and Africa. One of these has made history: playwright Vaclav Havel, the new Czech President. For years, from his prison cell, he exchanged letters with Pinter. The couple will visit Havel to share his triumph in February. She speaks her mind. And Fleet Street's columnists speak theirs, making the high-profile Lady Antonia a high-priority target. A succinct explanation for this targeting is offered by the London Daily Mail's senior feature writer, Geoffrey Levy: "She's an aristocrat. She's beautiful. She's a celebrity. And she is a successful writer. She is an irresistible target." Her father, the seventh Earl of Longford, sums up Fleet Street's anti-Antoniasm in a word: "Jealousy!" At home in London's fashionable Kensington, Antonia Pakenham Fraser Pinter is a composition by Gainsborough. Her English skin would make peaches weep in their cream. Blue eyes seem to savor a secret, shared but not revealed. She is tall, not willowy but womanly, and at 57 she is, by any standard, beautiful. Harold Pinter looks in for a bit of householdish chat on his way to his studio in an adjacent mews house. Such an easy, conventional moment, but achieved, some ten years ago, at such a personal price. Lady Antonia--"the title has cachet," notes her agent Michael Shaw--is dismissive of the personal attacks. "My father brought me up not to mind criticism or ridicule," she says. Lord Longford, a former Labour Cabinet minister, has endured both in his crusades against pornography and for prisoners' rights. The disparagement, in his family's view, stems from the fact that he, a nobleman who turned socialist, violated Britain's class order. Antonia much admires this man with the courage of his convictions, the progenitor of Britain's fabled Literary Longfords, a family unmatched--possibly in history--for its eight esteemed writers in three generations publishing contemporaneously. They are prizewinning and prodigious: at last count their output topped 80 volumes, most of them digging deep into British and Irish history. Scholarly research is the family hallmark. The brightest star in the family firmament is Antonia. Her mother recalls that this precocious firstborn "always wrote, even before she could write--poems, little stories. She could read before she had any idea of the meaning of the words. Frank and I called her the wonder child." Which is not to say she was candy-coated. Young Antonia was fiercely competitive, on the tennis courts with her brother Thomas and on the football team at a boys school that admitted a handful of girls on equal footing. The genesis, perhaps, of her view of woman-as-equal. As a student at Oxford, Antonia Pakenham (the family name) was the centerpiece of an oh, so uppah-crusty circle. "She was already a bit of a star at Oxford," says her father. But even as swains queued eagerly for her attention, "all of the time there was a more profound, intellectual side." At 22 she published her first book, on the mythical King Arthur. Her typewriter never cooled down, even after she married Hugh Fraser, a Conservative Member of Parliament, and produced three sons and three daughters. The result: 23 volumes. All the while she was ubiquitous on the TV-radio "chat show" circuit, bright and quippy for Call My Bluff, articulate and opinionated on the weighty Question Time. Last month Americans tuned to a highbrow quiz program on National Public Radio could hear Lady Antonia deftly identify an arcane quotation: "It's Milton--Lycidas." She gained her place as a major historian and writer in 1969 with her definitive biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, a best seller in eight languages. Then came Puritan ruler Oliver Cromwell and Charles II, the Restoration King. Each famous subject, perhaps not coincidentally, had a personal tie to her family. Cromwell granted her Anglo-Irish forebears land in West Meath in the heart of Ireland. (The Longfords, originally Protestant, converted to Catholicism one by one in the 1940s, in individual decisions.) The family is directly descended from Charles II. "Most people in England are," she chuckles, "and I'm no exception." All, of course, from "the wrong side of the blanket." She likes the fact that her line stems from the classy Duchess of Cleveland rather than the King's more ordinary mistress, actress Nell Gwyn. Some of the royal genes crop out now and then. Author Michael Holroyd, clearly a partisan, portrays Antonia entering a crowded room: "There's a stateliness about her. It's almost like a member of the royal family; people feel they should make a little bow. Some people are dazzled, some feel overawed. She can intimidate some and charm others. It's chemistry--and possibly height. But as soon as she laughs, the formality is completely dissolved." Adds playwright Arthur Miller, a frequent guest of the Pinters: "She has great elegance as a writer and as a person." Marigold Johnson, a devoted friend since Oxford days who is married to the sharply conservative writer and historian Paul Johnson, muses, "Men like her better than women." For a change of pace and a piece of change, the prolific Antonia takes breaks between works of history, which eat up three to four years, to write mystery stories featuring female detective Jemima Shore, who has made the leap to TV. But when she first joined the Crime Writers' Association, she was snubbed. "This glittering butterfly was too much for them," says an observer. Eventually, her seriousness won them over and--what else?--she became chairman. Beguiled by power, she writes of kings and queens. "And," she interjects, "the other side of the picture, the powerless. The powerful have such an extraordinary effect on the lives of people around them." This led to the work she found most demanding, The Weaker Vessel, her prize-winning tapestry of the harsh lot dealt to 17th century women. Her current project is the suggestion of old friend Robert Gottlieb, editor of the New Yorker: the six wives of Henry VIII, combining her three specialties, royalty, power and women. Her fascination with women of power resulted in The Warrior Queens, her last book, an analysis of women rulers who led their people into battle, from British Queen Boadicea in 60 A.D. to Israel's Golda Meir, India's Indira Gandhi and Prime Minister Thatcher, triumphant in the Falklands. Fraser identified history's typecasting of women leaders: the appendages, those who gain power by virtue of being wives, widows or daughters of a male ruler; the honorary male who rejects her femininity; and the female chieftain who is either "supernaturally chaste or preternaturally lustful." Fraser observes that when a woman holds power, "her sexuality is always relevant. That fascinates me." Assessing Thatcher, Fraser compares her to Queen Elizabeth I. "She's like a 16th century queen--not a modern one, powerless, gracious, noncontentious. Her handling of her femininity is astonishingly similar to that of Elizabeth I. She says, `I'm feminine, don't you forget it. I'll dress as a woman, but at the same time, I'm as good as a man.' She's like Elizabeth: `I've got the heart and stomach of a king!' She's old style, with courtiers and endless speculation about her favorites. Look at that photograph of her with her Cabinet--it says it all: she is the queen, among her dinner-jacketed knights. I think the fact that she has no woman in the Cabinet is extremely significant. Another woman would spoil the picture!" As a strong feminist, she voted for Thatcher in her first election, but now is deeply troubled about the Prime Minister and "the socially divisive effects of her policies that make it increasingly difficult for the really poor, who are very often hopeless." When Fraser expressed these concerns, she sparked charges that she was a "chateau-bottled socialist" who has prospered under the Thatcherism she deplores. In rebuttal, championing the independence of writers, Antonia snaps, "In France they would have given me a medal." She readily acknowledges that personal attacks sting. "Yes. Absolutely. Fair criticism is hurtful; unfair criticism is doubly hurtful." But Lady Antonia is past her Perfect Woman stage. That ended in 1975, when Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter discovered each other. Then came the gossip, the headlines, the charges in divorce court. Five turbulent years later they were married. (Both former spouses have since died.) Through it all, her staunchly Catholic family stood by her. Says Lady Longford: "From the word go, Antonia wanted a literary life. Her first husband was a Conservative M.P. I could see that wasn't really the kind of life she was meant for. What she is doing now with Harold and on her own perfectly fits in with everything." The gilded young aristocrat at Oxford and the Jewish lad from London's East End would never have intersected. "But it was our great good luck," Antonia says, "that by the time we met, we were both recognized." Opposites, fully formed, attracted. How do two famous talents under the same roof manage the egos, the stresses? She replies with a laugh, "A lot of our sentences begin, `I completely understand that you, too, are having a rotten time, but...' We read each other's things. We talk about them." A London critic comments that "living with Pinter has been a terrific influence for the better on her writing." "He wins on some things. I win on some things, too," she says. She wins on opera, he on cricket. But Antonia casts herself as the junior talent. "I don't criticize Harold's work. I influence Harold, I contribute to his work by living with him, by talking to him." She contributes in another way repeatedly cited by friends: Pinter's manner is as angular and abrupt as his characters, but, observes a friend, "Antonia smooths over the offenses before the evening is out. She is quite good as stage manager." Marigold Johnson pinpoints Pinter's greatest effect on Antonia: "She has become a lot more involved in public issues, a much more public figure." And she is planted distinctly to the left of her days as wife of a Tory M.P. Activist Antonia is deeply committed to writers imprisoned for their written words. "I feel passionately about this," she declares, and she leads the cause for English PEN. Holroyd, former PEN president, sings her praises: "She knows when to press and when not to; she can let loose the dogs on them, or she can charm them. Pinter tends to blow his top; she's got a great deal of common sense." Arthur Miller, longtime advocate for imprisoned writers, concurs: "She is very effective." She regularly writes to the prisoners: "We may never hear from them but we keep writing, for years." She rejoices that now for the first time Russian writers are in PEN and Czech writers are back in the fold. "It's a labor of Sisyphus," she sighs. "Just as they are let out in Russia, they've increased in Turkey and Kenya." The kaleidoscopic Lady Antonia, a dishy blue-blood intellectual, seems tailor-made as the heroine of a romantic novel. Pity that Fraser the writer shuns that pop genre--it would make a lively autobiography. </body> </article> </text>